Best strategy for overcoming excessive gethostbyname timeout.

r0g aioe.org at technicalbloke.com
Fri Nov 27 20:35:36 EST 2009


Hi,

I'm writing a reliability monitoring app but I've run into a problem. I
was hoping to keep it very simple and single threaded at first but
that's looking unlikely now! The crux of it is this...

gethostbyname ignores setdefaulttimeout.

It seems gethostbyname asks the OS to resolve the address and the OS
uses it's own timeout value ( 25 seconds ) rather than the one provided
in setdefaulttimeout. 25 seconds of blocking is way too long for me, I
want the response within 5 seconds or not at all but I can see no
reasonable way to do this without messing with the OS which naturally I
am loathe to do!

The two ideas I've had so far are...

Implement a cache. For this to work I'd need to avoid issuing
gethostbyname until the cached address fails. Of course it will fail a
little bit further down i the calling code when the app tries to use it
and I'd then need it to refresh the cache and try again. That seems very
kludgey to me :/

A pure python DNS lookup. This seems better but is an unknown quantity.
How big a job is it to use non-blocking sockets to write a DNS lookup
function with a customisable timeout? A few lines? A few hundred? I'd
only need to  resolve v4 addresses for the foreseeable.

Any comments on these strategies, or any suggestions of methods you
think might work better or be a lot easier to implement, warmly received.

Roger.



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